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Review Summary

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator — Zak Orth, sounding a lot like Woody Allen — paraphrasing Shakespeare. You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. This movie, after all, is a tale told by Mr. Allen, who is very far from an idiot and who has become the American cinema’s great champion of cosmic insignificance.
Not that there’s much sound and fury here, though there are a few bouts of yelling and screaming, and potentially tragic situations played with an unlikely and not unwelcome buoyancy. The metaphysical pessimism that constitutes Mr. Allen’s annual greeting-card message to the human race — just in case we needed reminding that our existence is meaningless — is served up in “Tall Dark Stranger” with a wry shrug and an amusing flurry of coincidences, reversals and semi-surprises. There are hints of farce, droplets of melodrama, a few dangling loose ends and an overall mood of sloppy, tolerant cynicism.
At this point in his career — 40 features in about as many years — Mr. Allen has both mastered his craft and grown indifferent to it. Does he take any pleasure in making these movies? Does he expect the audience to take any?
It’s hard to say, since he seems to make films, and we seem to watch them (at least those of us who still do) more through force of habit than because of any great inspiration or conviction. But then again, given the nonexistence of any controlling moral order in the universe, what else can we do? And what else would we want him to do?
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” finds Mr. Allen back in London (the setting of “Match Point,”“Scoop” and “Cassandra’s Dream”) with some Spanish financing (as he had in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and an international cast that includes, principally and in alphabetical order, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Freida Pinto, Lucy Punch and Naomi Watts. They all hit their marks and barrel through Mr. Allen’s grammatically impeccable (and in this case mostly joke-free) dialogue, turning some of the city’s nicer real estate, gilded by Vilmos Zsigmond’s suave cinematography, into tableaus of romantic disappointment, domestic misery and erotic longing.